Remember Wander? Forget Wander. I never really understood what exactly the travel app was supposed to do, as evidenced by this muddled description of the company’s demo 10 months ago. Judging by what the company finally released today, neither did they.

Instead, meet Days. It is the result of 10 months of focus groups, A/B testing and experimentation behind closed doors — the exact opposite of the lean startup approach. What Wander, ahem, Days, launches today is more like a maximum viable product. The company got all of the pivots and iterations out of the way before the launch of their product, a move that I applauded last month, when the company opted not to launch at SXSW. With the volume of photo sharing apps I’m asked to try each week, it’s hard to know which ones won’t pivot to some new strategy a month after I’ve written a story about them. It’s always awkward (for me, the audience, and the startup) to ask people to try an app when the founders themselves aren’t fully convinced it’ll work.

Wander/Days was able take its time and get its launch perfect, thanks to the luxury of a $1.2 million seed round from NextView Ventures, SoftTech VC, SV Angel (a PandoDaily investor), Google Ventures, Collaborative Fund, Red Swan, David Tisch and Kal Vepuri.

ANYWAYS, the product. Days is a record of your days, via photos and gifs. It is a way to share an image stream of the things you encounter all day, and a place for the minutia that’s too lame or boring to post on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter. Those networks are home to your extraordinary doings — the most beautiful vacay photos on Facebook, the wittiest witticisms on Twitter, the prettiest sunsets on Instagram. The goal of Days is to take everything, from your breakfast or the front door of your office, to your meeting room, your grocery trip, and your commute home. It sounds boring, but all together it paints a portrait of your day that your friends and family don’t typically see. The content shared on Days resembles what it’d like to shadow someone.

By now we’re all sick of photo sharing apps, but I’m writing about this one because it fits neatly into a two key themes I’ve been tracking.

1. Storytelling. We’re creating so much disparate content that lives in separate, often walled-off, parts of the web, and our use of various social media tools is only getting more fragmented with each new app that gains adoption. Days tells the story of your day; it’s a comprehensive all-in-one-place look at what you did, versus various snippets scattered across the web. One way Days promotes a complete story is with a 24-hour rule. You can’t share photos in real time. Instead, you share the entire stream of your day the next day. It’s a nice way to slow down the never-ending stream and look at the fuller picture.

2. Authenticity. We are sick of being “brand managers” of our Facebook pages, which we curate to present a perfect version of ourselves. Instagram and Twitter are no better. That’s why apps like Snapchat and Whisper have exploded, particularly among teens: they allow users to be themselves, either for a disappearing moment in time as on Snapchat, or totally anonymously as on Whisper.

Days has a feature in common with Snapchat — users can only share photos taken with the Days app. The lack of imports means Days wants to replace your camera as the go-to place to dump every pic. Photos are still saved to your camera roll if you want to share them on Instagram or Facebook later, too. And Days has no filters, no editing. The goal is to create a complete and realistic portrait of your day.

All that said — I am not the target market for Days. I like it, but I don’t take that many photos throughout the day and I never made a habit of using the Days camera over my regular camera. That doesn’t matter though — this app has been tweaked within an inch of its life to suit teenagers, who share everything, take a million photos a day, and want authenticity online. If they liked Snapchat and Whisper, they’ll like Days.

Days is a daily visual diary that makes lifesharing easy and addictive. Instead of sharing the photos you take one-by-one, you share all the moments from a given day as a single atomic unit–"this was my day on Saturday." It's like a social camera roll: rather than deciding which photos to share, you choose what to keep private or delete.

Days answers the question “what did you do today?" and bridges the gap between status updates (which are easy to create but rarely interesting or coherent in aggregate–Facebook Timeline) and anthologies (which have lasting value, but require more effort and forward-thinking than most people can muster–1 Second Everyday).

Erin Griffith covers New York startups for PandoDaily. She's worked as staff writer for Adweek and a private equity blogger for peHUB. Her writing has appeared in Venture Capital Journal, BBC.com, Time Out New York, Huffington Post, FT.com, and BUST. She plays keyboard in a band called Team Genius and Tweets as @Eringriffith.

Booker, which helps service businesses better engage with customers online, has raised $35 million in a Series C round led by Medina Capital, with participation from strategic investor First Data, Jump Capital, and Signal Peak Ventures, as well as existing investors. The New York City company now sees 3 million appointments booked monthly across 73 countries in 11 languages on its platform. [via Booker]

PCH, a company which “helps entrepreneurs turn ideas into brands and makes a variety of consumer tech products for major companies such as Apple,” has acquired Fab for a reported $15 million in cash and stock. Fab previously had a $1 billion valuation and raised $325 million. It will “continue to focus on design” at PCH. [Source: Bloomberg]

BlackBerry has unveiled several new smartphones at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, including the touchscreen-focused BlackBerry Leap and a device with a “dual curve slider,” in addition to its keyboard-equipped products. [Source: New York Times]

March 3, 2015

“I hope to have a bigger presence in the tech world. I love coming up with different app ideas, and I have a few more that are coming out. Once you get started and you have this creative bug of ideas that you want to get out, I feel like I’ve partnered with the right team, and now I have the creative outlet to make that happen. I’m happy that people are into it and perceiving it well. I just want to create more apps.”

PayPal is planning to acquire Paydiant, the company behind CurrentC — retailers’ answer to Apple Pay — for a reported $280 million. No word yet on how the companies will mix, nor if Paydiant’s relationship with the industry group behind CurrentC will remain intact. [Source: Re/code]

Microsoft is in talks to acquire Prismatic, a news aggregation service that uses natural language processing to recommend content in which its users might be interested, according to a report from TechCrunch. Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook are all said to have expressed similar interest in the company. (Which is surely a sign of actual interest and not at all an attempt by someone at the company to make it seem like a hot commodity — right?) [Source: TechCrunch]

March 2, 2015

“Just wanted to confirm that the rumors are true — I’m excited to be running Google’s Photos and Streams products! It’s important to me that these changes are properly understood to be positive improvements to both our products and how they reach users.”